The present invention generally pertains to teaching machines utilizing electronic data processing circuits and is particularly directed to the type of teaching machine wherein the machine responds to an answer provided by a student by indicating whether or not the answer is correct.
In many prior art teaching machines of this type the student is provided with the question and a plurality of predetermined answer choices from which to choose. The answer is generally provided by the student operating some type of input device such as a keyboard on which the keys correspond to the predetermined answer choices. The machine then compares the answer indication provided by the student with a correct answer indication stored in the machine, and provides a response indicating the correctness of the student's answer. In some machines the response takes the form of the machine advancing to a presentation of another question, thereby indicating that the answer provided by the student was correct, or, alternatively, of the machine doing absolutely nothing, thereby indicating to the student that the indicated answer that he has provided was incorrect and that he should select a different one of predetermined answer choices.
However teaching machines presenting predetermined answer choices to the student are not as well suited for teaching some subjects, such as spelling, as are machines in which no predetermined choices are provided; but instead, the student must create the answer to be provided. With this latter type of machine, when the student is requested to spell a given word, the student must correctly provide indications of all of the words characters in their proper sequence. In such a machine each indicated character is compared with a correct character indication sequence stored in the machine on a character by character basis.
It is desired that the characters be displayed as they are correctly indicated in sequence in order to provide to the student reinforcement that he is proceeding correctly with his answer. Typically, a prior art character display devices displays each character in a dot matrix format consisting of rows and columns. Each row of the character is formed by a signal from a character generator which generates such character forming signals on a row by row basis in response to an input character indication. Separate character generators and such associated components as storage registers are included for each character position in the display sequence. Although such a display could be readily provided by those teaching machines wherein a stand alone large capacity digital computer is accessed by a keyboard, it heretofore has not been available in relatively less expensive fully portable teaching machines, such as those wherein a plurality of predetermined answer choices are provided.